Sex, self-interest and health care priorities

In this questionnaire study, individuals were asked to prioritise publicly provided preventive health care services, one of which would be unavailable to them by virtue of their sex. The aim was to establish whether men and women would exhibit different degrees of self-interest when making a constrained choice. Around 1800 subjects from east-central England prioritised three different types of cancer screening. Most also provided written explanations for their rankings and these were classified into explanatory themes. Logistic regressions using socio-demographic and attitude data predicted the type of screening chosen as first priority. The analysis revealed that many men and women did indeed assign similar priorities to the different types of screening and, even when the priorities differed, these were often justified by similar arguments relating to technical aspects of the interventions and to self-interest. However, women were far more likely than men to prioritise a type of screening from which they themselves would benefit directly and the variations in preferences and explanations between the sexes occurred primarily because of differences in other-regarding attitudes. The bias towards screening of females was driven by women's greater worries about the disease in question and by men's “benevolent sexism” with respect to women's wellbeing.     

Choosing an electoral rule: Values and self-interest in the lab

We study the choice of multi-person bargaining protocols in the context of politics. In politics, citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic rules, for instance via referendums. If they support the rule that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment, in which 252 subjects participated. In the first stage, these subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second stage, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. We find that egalitarian values that subjects hold outside of the lab shape their choice of electoral rule in the second stage when a rule led to a fairer distribution of payoffs compared to the other one in the first stage. The implication is that people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for decision rules.     

Social and family responsibility or self-interest?

Mothers’ increasing labour market participation is posed as a key aspect of a growing trend towards individualization — both for ill and for good. In ‘for ill’ versions, mothers’ employment is regarded as undermining commitment to family relationships and leading to a loss of community. In ‘for good’ versions, family and community relationships become contingent upon values of equality and respect. ‘Preference theory’ modifies the individualization thesis, with a posited distinction between mothers in full-time employment with ‘work-centred’ identities and those with part-time work who want ‘adaptive’ or ‘home-centred’ identities. This paper examines such issues, drawing on qualitative case study research on mothers employed full and part time in a hospital and an accountancy firm in the UK. It considers how the variable work ethos of organizations, and the ways mothers engage with these, can interact with their engagement in family and community relationships. In particular, it suggests that employment can be as much about social obligation in a local community, and commitment and obligations to family, as about individualized self-provision and options.     

Arbitrator bias and self-interest: Lessons from the baseball labor market

Their desire for enduring employment is commonly assumed to induce arbitrators to make fair awards. We find, however, that in major league baseball's unique institutional setting, selfinterested behavior by arbitrators has led to bias against players and preservation of monopsony rents for team owners. We apply a standard model of arbitrator behavior to all 391 arbitrated cases in baseball since 1979. Under conditions that should lead to an even split in awards to teams and players, probit analysis indicates that arbitrators favor teams 61 percent of the time. Furthermore, bias against African-American and Latinborn players is even more pronounced.     

Eliciting survey cooperation: incentives, self-interest, and norms of cooperation

Given the weaker ties to community as noted by scholars such as Robert Putnam, survey researchers should not be surprised by a decline in survey participation over the past 10 years. This research analyzes the use of incentives coupled with introductory themes emphasizing cooperation and helpfulness--cooperative norms in American society--to understand their effects on survey response. This article analyzes two separate experiments (one phone and one mail) that provide evidence that norms of cooperation matter in the decision to participate in a survey, suggesting that this is particularly true at the refusal conversion stage. These results indicate that survey researchers may use such themes to their advantage, especially when conducting a nonresponse follow-up in a mail survey.     

Gender and self-employment selection: An empirical assessment

This paper presents a unique assessment of the factors that influence men's and women's decisions to switch from wage employment to self-employment; virtually all studies of self-employment entry have heretofore focussed solely upon men. Using longitudinally matched data from the Current Population Survey, novel empirical patterns adduced here include: (1) the relatively strong, positive influence of fertility upon women's selection into self-employment; (2) the greater propensity of small business employees to switch to self-employment; and (3) the significant relationship between wage-sector occupation and predisposition to self-employment.     

Fairness and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model in which we examine how concern about fairness might affect voter behavior. We show that in the first period politicians choose the median voter’s position even if this does not correspond to their bliss points and neither they nor the voters can commit to a particular action. Moreover, concern about fairness creates substantial incumbency advantages. Our results hold even if voters care very little about fairness.     

When self-interest and age sterotypes collide: elders opposing increased funds for programs benefiting themselves

Elders tend to be portrayed by the media as selfishly promoting programs that benefit the old. We predicted, however, that older individuals who choose positive stereotypes about the young over positive stereotypes about the old would oppose an increase in spending on these programs. By analyzing the responses of 1656 individuals, we found: (1) older participants were more likely than younger participants to oppose increased funding of Social Security, Meals on Wheels, and Medicare; and (2) this opposition to increased funding for Social Security and Meals on Wheels was predicted by a stereotype of aging based on a more favorable perception of the capabilities of the young than of the old. Our findings suggest that elders' evaluation of programs that benefit their age group may be more influenced by stereotypes internalized decades earlier than by their current group interests.     

More than self-interest: Why different classes have different attitudes to income inequality

The connection between social class and political preferences is among the most well established in the social sciences. This association is typically taken as prima facie evidence of economic self-interest: Classes hold different attitudes, values, and party preferences because they have different economic interests. However, this assumption has rarely been tested empirically. In this article, we use survey data from 18 West European countries to examine why classes differ on a central aspect of political preferences, namely their views on the desirability of income inequality. We find that only a moderate proportion of differences between employee classes in support for redistribution can be accounted for by contemporary differences in resources and risks; differences in economic interests to some degree account for the anti-redistributive preferences of the professional middle classes compared with the working class. However, the preferences of the self-employed have a different explanation; autonomy is a better explanation of the right-wing preferences of the self-employed compared with the working class.     

Interpersonal risk assessment and social preferences: An experimental study

We investigate interpersonal risk assessment, that is how individuals use either their own or their partner’s monetary resources to offset the risk that affects them or their partner. The observed behavior is in line with the predictions of a simple piecewise linear model of social preferences. Overall, individuals opportunistically draw from others’ resources to offset risk; furthermore, they display higher levels of risk aversion when delegated to choose for others rather than when choosing for themselves. However, different social types differ in the assessment of interpersonal risk. Considering our results, we suggest that studies dealing with interpersonal risk assessment should not only focus on risk preferences, but also take into account social preferences.     

An assessment of occupational and organizational commitment: A multivariate analysis

Data from 120 park and forest rangers were used to empirically assess the relative impact of sociodemographic, attitudinal, and organizational factors on both occupational and organizational commitment. Through the use of multiple regression analysis, sociodemographic and attitudinal factors were shown generally to bear a positive relationship to both types of commitment. Upon further analysis of partials based on type of occupation, some specification of the original relationships was noted, thereby indicating a note of caution in generalizing findings concerning occupational and organizational commitment from one group of occupational practitioners to another.     

Autobiographical interviewing and narrative analysis: An approach to psychosocial assessment

Use of an autobiographical interviewing approach in the psychosocial assessment process allows the clinician efficient access to rich diagnostic material in a way that is comfortable for the client. This approach invites rather than discourages storytelling and is consistent with recent interest in narrative perspectives on assessment and treatment. This article describes the use of the autobiographical interview with a chemically dependent woman and details three analytical approaches for understanding the self-narratives which result.     

Character Counts?: Honesty and Fairness in Election 2000

This article examines the impact that voters’ evaluationsof the candidates’ character had on their vote choicein the 2000 presidential election. We find that while the magnitudeof the impact of character on the vote was roughly equal forboth major party candidates, contrary to common perception,the substantive significance of character evaluations disproportionatelyaffected George W. Bush. Our results indicate the need to accountfor the influence of character in other elections, given thatcharacter issues are a recurring theme in American presidentialcampaigns.     

对公平只能兼顾吗？

公平,应当是机会公平、规则公平,应当是政治公平、经济公平、文化(包括教育)公平、社会公平。竞争能出效率,公平、和谐也能出效率,出水平,出高度。     

A self-interest analysis of justice and tax compliance: How distributive justice moderates the effect of outcome favorability

Compliance with tax authorities has been studied mainly in the fields of economics and psychology. The focus has respectively been on self-interest motives and justice concerns in tax compliance. We argue that both concerns are less divergent than is often thought. Specifically, we studied the moderating role of distributive justice on the relationship between outcome favorability and tax compliance in two cross-sectional surveys. It is generally believed that favorable outcomes increase compliance because they decrease what can be gained from non-compliance. The present research addresses the role of distributive justice in this process. Since people believe that distributive fairness guarantees their long-term outcomes, favorable present outcomes now imply favorable future outcomes and unfavorable present outcomes now imply unfavorable future outcomes. Thus, we expected fair outcomes to result in a strong relationship between outcome favorability and compliance. On the basis that unfair outcomes are believed to result from chance, outcome favorability should have a weaker relationship with compliance when outcomes are unfair. Even when controlling for other variables, this prediction was supported by both studies.     

Free enterprise, professional ideology, and self-interest: an analysis of resistance by Canadian physicians to universal health insurance

Under Canada's universal health care system, physicians are remunerated through government-run health insurance plans; a private market for physicians' services is virtually nonexistent. A proposal to ban the practice of extra-billing, whereby some physicians billed patients for amounts over and above insured rates, met with physicians' opposition. The particular constellation of legislative, social, and political events that followed the proposed ban presented a unique opportunity to explore the nature of the medical profession's resistance to encroachment on professional autonomy. The results of this survey of physicians in four specialties (N = 313) in metropolitan Toronto suggest that resistance to universal health insurance is complex; it involves a prevailing social ideology among physicians, which happens to be antiwelfare and conservative generally, entangled with economic self-interest and a specific set of beliefs about medical practice and physicians' rights and privileges.     

Employment effects of trade in intermediate and final goods: An empirical assessment

The steady growth of international trade in intermediate goods and services has made the relationship between trade and the international division of labour more complex. For 39 countries, the author decomposes the employment effects of international trade into five components, namely, the labour content of – or employment generated by – (1) exports; (2) imports; (3) the import content of exports; (4) the export content of imports; and (5) the third‐country import content of imports. He shows that in 2009, trade in intermediate goods accounted for some 88 million jobs – 14 per cent of all jobs generated by international trade – while the import content of exports accounted for 44 million jobs.     

Integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in survey research on aging: An assessment

The benefits of triangulation have gained widespread acceptance and several notable studies have taken a combined-methods approach. However, to date there have been few analyses of attempts to extend survey research to include a qualitative component. This paper reports on what is essentially a survey research design in which three types of interviewing are triangulated: close-ended questions in a structured interview; open-ended questions embedded in the interview; and follow-up conversational interviews employing open-ended questions. This combined-methods approach is assessed in relation to elaboration of answers, interpretation and context, discovery in the field, and divergence. The author concludes that each source of data, as well as the divergence in findings among them, makes a valuable contribution to the research process.